Macaulay, reviewing Barere's Memoirs—and allowing for the difference in time and manners and morals there is a strange similarity between the leader of the French Revolution and the leader of the Senate—said, "We now propose to do him, by the blessing of God, full and signal justice."
We think we may say, with proper humility, that, by the blessing of God, we have done Senator Henry Cabot Lodge full and signal justice.
BERNARD M. BARUCH
A clever woman magazine writer once asked Bernard M. Baruch for some information about the peace treaty. The question was not in his special field, the economic sections of the treaty, and he told her so.
"It took him one sentence to say that he could not tell me what I wanted to know," she described the interview afterward. "And then he talked to me for two hours about himself. He told me of his start in life as a three-dollar-a-week clerk, how rich he was, his philosophy of life; how you should recognize defeat when it was coming, accept it before it was complete and overwhelming and start out afresh, how liberal and advanced were his social views, how with all his wealth he was ready to accept a capital tax as perhaps the best way out of the bog in which the war had left the world, how democratic he was in his relations with his employees and his servants. It all seemed as amazing to him as if he were describing someone else, or as if it had just happened the day before."
Perhaps it is only to women and to journalists that men talk so frankly about themselves, to the most romantic and best trained listening sex and profession, who perforce survey the heights from below. But this young woman's experience was, I have reason to believe, a common one.
Is it vanity? You say that a man who talks so much about himself must be vain. To conclude that he is vain is not to understand Mr. Baruch. Is a child vain when it brings some little childish accomplishment, some infantile drawing on paper, and delightedly and frankly marvels at what he has done? It is given to children and to the naive openly to wonder at themselves without vanity, with a deep underlying sense of humility, and in Mr. Baruch's case the unaffected delight in himself proceeds from real humility.
After twenty-five years in the jungle of Wall Street, there is—contradictions multiply in his case—much of the child about Mr. Baruch, simple, trustful—outside of Wall Street,—incapable of concealment,—outside of Wall Street—of that which art has taught the rest of us to conceal. His humility makes him wonder; his naivete makes him talk quite frankly, unrestrained by the conventions that balk others. After all, is not wondering at yourself a sign of humility? A vain man, become great by luck, by force of circumstances, by the possession of gifts which he does not himself fully understand, would still take himself for granted. He would not be a romance to himself, but a solid, unassailable fact.
For Baruch the great romance is Baruch, the astonishing plaything of fate, who started life as a three-dollar-a-week broker's clerk; made millions, lost millions, made millions again, lost millions again; finally, still young, quit Wall Street with a fortune that left the game of the market dull and commonplace, seeking a new occupation for his energies; became during the war next to the President, the most powerful man in Washington; emerged from the war, which wrecked most reputations, with a large measure of credit, prepared by the amazing past for an equally amazing future. A career like that makes it impossible for the man who knows it best not to expect anything. Why not the "Disraeli of America?"—a phrase he once, rather confidentially, employed concerning his anticipated future.